Siddhartha Jaiswal, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pathology and member of the institute, has received a New Innovator Award for $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health. Innovator Awards are given to those who are conducting high-risk, high reward research. His research focuses on understanding the biology of mutations important to the development of blood cancers and other age-related diseases. As a postdoctoral scholar at the Broad Institute, he identified a pre-malignant state for blood stem cell clones that regulates their blood-forming capabilities. 

“Several years ago, I discovered that cancer-associated mutations are common in the blood of aging humans and predispose them to leukemia, heart disease and early death,” Jaiswal said. “However, our understanding of the causes and consequences of these mutations is incomplete. The funding from this award will allow my lab to explore the links between these mutations and a vast array of other aging-related diseases in hundreds of thousands of people. Our group will also identify the factors that promote the growth of these stem cell clones, which may lead to new therapies that prevent the development of blood cancers or other aging diseases associated with these mutations.”

Jaiswal is a member of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, Stanford Cancer Institute, the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and Stanford Bio-X.